UCLA's Asian American Studies Center recently announced the publication of “The State of Illness and Disability in Asian America,” first issue of the Amerasia Journal entirely devoted to disabilities studies. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary project is spearheaded by Jennifer Ho of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and James Kyung-Jin Lee of UC Irvine and features leading scholars working in the fields of Asian American studies and disabilities studies.
“The State of Illness and Disability in Asian America” covers a wide variety of topics examined from a broad range of perspectives, from compelling first-person accounts to innovative research articles. This special issue tackles illness and disability from the vantage points of poetics, ethics, and politics, presenting subjects that have been previously overlooked in Asian American Studies, including autism and representations of deafness, as well as re-examining more familiar matters, such as John Okada’s novel, "No-No Boy" and the case of the Siamese Twins Chang and Eng Bunker.
Yet no matter the topic and approach, what stands out about the contributions is the committed, urgent tone the authors use to convey their respective messages — be it a personal account of undergoing breast cancer treatments or a call to rethink the ableist figures of speech we use in politics.
